


Last Dance

by PlaidAdder



Series: Wild About Harry [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Crossover, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, a little bit meta, sign of three, spoilers for sign of three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1157955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Watson goes to John and Mary's wedding.  It's a little weird. Because until Harry woke up that morning, Mary had been dead for quite some time.</p><p>****<br/>TIn which I mourn the fact that "Empty Hearse" and "Sign of Three" have totally invalidated the timeline I created in "Empty Houses" and "Young Men Carbuncular." It will make a tiny bit more sense if you've also read "Recovery," but that's not really necessary. </p><p>At the time I wrote it, I hadn't seen "His Last Vow" yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Dance

Harry Watson woke up hung over.

She lay in bed for a while, testing her body for symptoms, making sure it wasn't a cold, or fatigue, or fever, or something else. When all hope was pretty much lost, Harry limped out of her bed, staggered into the bathroom, and stared into the mirror. That particular test was conclusive. She'd seen that face looking back at her too many times.

It struck her, as she stared in shock at her own bleary eyes, that the mirror itself seemed less familiar. It was really a wall--a large rectangle of reflective glass that had been installed over the sink. It was not the gilt-edged oval wall mirror that she had picked out at that thrift shop in Soho two weeks ago and installed in place of the old one that reminded her too much of the whole Kingfisher mess. 

In fact, this bathroom was bigger, and newer, and cheaper, than it used to be. And yet it did not seem entirely strange either.

Harry opened the medicine cabinet. There was a bottle of aspirin just waiting for her, half-empty. She took two, then plodded back to the bedroom and out into the living area.

What a nasty shade of beige that carpet was. What a cheap set of mismatched furniture. What a poky little kitchen, its sink choked with piled-up unwashed pots and pans. 

This was not her London flat. _This_ was the shitbox one-bedroom furnished rental in that complex in Norwood whose lease she had signed the day she finally decided she had had enough of Clara. It was all she could afford at the time, when she was still responsible for half the mortgage, and still trying to get sober.

Harry stood very still at the edge of the carpet. She was afraid that if she moved, if she touched anything, this nightmare would become real. Her eyes fell on the battered, square, ex-Pottery Barn table in front of the sofa. Opened and unopened mail lay scattered across it. It hurt her to look at it. One thing she had promised herself, in exchange for giving up drinking: everything would be neat. Everything would be in order. Her home would look like somewhere a lawyer would actually live.

Mortgage statement, electric bill, credit card statement, square of stiff cream-colored paper requesting the pleasure of her presence at the wedding of John Hamish Watson to Mary Elizabeth Morstan.

Quietly, the universe began to implode.

"Date," she said, out loud, in a raspy voice. "What fucking date is it?"

She lurched over to the table and picked up the invitation.

Ten seconds later she was tearing through the flat looking for her mobile. She found it at last. As her head cleared a bit, she was relieved to realize that she did in fact remember the number. All 342 digits of it.

Harry listened to it ring, glaring with revulsion at the disorder around her. On the end table by the sofa there were three empty beer bottles. A small pile of others had collected on the rug, near the table legs.

"Hello?"

The voice was totally unfamiliar. Wondering if she had perhaps dialed somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy by mistake, Harry said, "I'm sorry...I must have the wrong..."

"Harry!" the voice burst out, with the enthusiasm of a puppy chasing a stick. "Harry Watson! I've been wondering when I'd hear from you. It's the Doctor. Sorry about the voice, you know, regeneration, everything changes."

"Oh," Harry said. "Is Donna there?"

"Afraid not," said the new Doctor. "Regeneration's a terrible strain on a relationship, Harry. We tried to make it work, we really did, but it just wouldn't. As a last sort of attempt, you know, kind of a peace offering..." His voice trailed off, then resumed with another burst of cheer. "How are you liking it, Harry? Your--you know--life, and everything?"

An icy wave of cold anger engulfed Harry's whole body.

"What did you do?" she said.

"Funny thing about time," the Doctor went on babbling. "There are fixed points, and then there's flux, and then there are these things called RAPs, Relative Anchor Points, and as it turns out--"

"What did you do to my timeline, Doctor?" Harry demanded, her hand clutching the phone tighter. "WHAT DID YOU DO?"

"Tell you what, Harry," said the Doctor, still invincibly elated. "I'll just pop round and explain, shall I? Won't be a jiffy."

The phone went dead. Behind her, Harry could hear the sound of time and space warping to let something through.

****

Harry sat on the couch, her legs drawn up so that he feet wouldn't have to touch the bottles. The nausea was worse and her hands were beginning to shake. She was painfully aware of the fact that there were, most likely, a few bottles still left in the apartment. She had always stashed some away, before she started in, so she'd have a hair of the dog for the next morning. She did her best to focus on the Doctor's new face. He was fully grown, with large hands and features, and yet his face looked so young, and when he was talking excitedly and flapping his hands, as he was right now, he looked about twelve.

"...and Donna's always wished she could return the favor," the Doctor was saying. "And she always talks about how you were so sad about having lost that memory of the accident. So one day, we'd hit a bit of a rough patch, and I wanted to do something nice for her, and I suddenly thought, I'll go look. I'll go find out what happened that night, and if it's good, Donna would enjoy coming back and telling you, and if it wasn't..."

Harry pressed her hands against her roiling stomach, trying to quiet it down.

"You went back to the night of the accident."

"I went back. And. Well. It was just awful, Harry," he said, making a face. "So, so, so sad. Incredibly sad. Why didn't you tell us you were in love with Mary?"

"That I was WHAT?" Harry shouted.

The Doctor blinked at her.

"So," he said, surveying her face and noting the reaction. "You...you weren't aware of that."

"No I bloody wasn't!"

The Doctor nodded, bringing his hands together. "Ah. You were with Clara, weren't you, and Mary was engaged to your brother, so I suppose you, you know, repressed it, and it was the sort of thing were only aware of when you were...uh..."

"I  _told her?"_ Harry cried. "Oh God. Please don't tell me I ruined Mary's dying moments by--"

"No, no of course not, Harry," the Doctor said, soothingly. "You didn't tell her while she was dying."

"Thank God."

"You told her at the hen party."

"Christ!" Harry cried, curling up into a nauseated and sweating ball. "How do you know that?"

"Well I couldn't just let you sit there watching the woman you loved die, Harry," said the Doctor briskly. "It was just too hideous. Something had to be done. But it was a bit tricky. You see, the accident is what we call a relative anchor point. It's a bit like a fixed point but only relative to certain earlier events. If you went to that hen party, then the accident always happened, no matter what I did to stop it. And your being in love with your brother's fiancee was no good anyway, was it?"

"No," Harry snapped.

"So to fix that I went back a bit earlier, you know, and then a bit earlier than that, and--long story short," the Doctor went on, rather desperately, "the only way to prevent the accident was to prevent you meeting Mary at all. It's a curious thing, though--"

Harry held up a hand and tried to sound calm.

"Stop. Please. One moment."

"Right," said the Doctor, folding his hands and blinking at her.

"I'm just trying to understand," Harry said. "You went back on my timeline and deliberately changed it. And now I'm living...this one."

The Doctor nodded, pleased; and then his brows furrowed. "What's the matter?" he said. "Don't you like it?"

"Do I _like_ it?" Harry roared. "Take a fucking look around! I'm alone in this dump, I'm still doing fucking wills and estates in fucking Norwood, I'm a mess, I'm not even  _sober!"_  

The Doctor blinked in confusion. 

"But Mary's alive," the Doctor said, plaintively. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

Harry stared at him for so long that he started to look very uncomfortable.

"Clara's alive too, by the way," the Doctor added, hoping to mollify her.

"Great," Harry bit off.

The silence became unbearable, but the Doctor didn't seem to know what to do about it. He seemed to have no idea why any of this was making her upset.

"So I never met Mary," Harry forced out. "But she's marrying John anyway."

"Yes. It's curious how her engagement to your brother reasserts itself no matter--"

"When?"

"Well, as a matter of fact, today."

"And I remember my now-defunct timeline why?"

"You still have part of a timelord consciousness," said the Doctor, unhappily. "We remember all the alternatives."

He was really very hurt by the failure of what had apparently been meant as a kind gesture. Harry felt just a tiny twinge of sympathy for him. But her head still hurt, and the strain of stopping herself from going into the kitchen to look for a bottle was just about crushing her.

"I can't ask you to fix this, can I?" Harry said. "Because that would kill Mary. And Clara."

"Well, I couldn't do it, anyway," said the Doctor. "A personal timeline is like an elastic band. You can play around with it only so much before it snaps, and...well..."

He trailed off, disconsolate. Harry took a deep breath.

"Well, Doctor," Harry said, trying to sit up and take charge. "In return for my not leaping across this table and throttling you, may I ask you to do two things for me?"

"Absolutely," said the Doctor promptly. And then, suddenly apprehensive, "What are they?"

"Thing one," Harry said. "I want you to look through every part of this apartment and find every glass bottle that still has liquid in it and I want you to pour all the liquid down the sink drain."

"Don't see the point, Harry, but if you really wish it, I'll be happy to--"

"I will be here on this sofa, in a state of barely-controlled panic," Harry said. "When you are finished, I will go get dressed, and then after that, I need you to drop me off at this time and place." She waved the invitation at him. "Because there's no way I'm driving."

*****

Harry trudged up the drive in her dress shoes. It was dark, and from the looks of things dinner was over and the dancing had begun. So she'd missed most of it. Well, in her current unstable condition, that was probably for the best; and it was a kind of a miracle, really, that the Doctor had managed to land on the right day. She straightened her cuffs, tugged her jacket into place, and marched with as much resolve as she could muster past the unmarked police car in the driveway, into which a slight man with dark hair was being bundled. 

She stopped to look. The handcuffed man disappeared; the door slammed; and Lestrade's head popped up on the opposite side of the car. The floodlights picked out little short spiky silver gleams in his hair. He wore an expression of grim satisfaction that evoked such a burst of affection that she couldn't help calling out, "Greg!"

His head turned. His eyes rest on her briefly, blankly, and then he kept looking for whoever had called him. It couldn't have been Harry, of course. Because he had no idea who she was.

Harry swallowed a lump in her throat. 

His eyes came back to her.

"Move along, please," he barked. "Nothing to see here."

Harry turned away. Her eyes were stinging. It was only Lestrade, and it still hurt that much. This was not good. 

She stepped into the entrance hall. She could hear the music coming through the arch from the ballroom on the other side. A dark-haired bridesmaid was standing there, chatting with a tall, narrow man in a dark suit. He launched, suddenly, into a pirouette. The bridesmaid clapped and laughed. Harry watched the rotation end. He stopped facing her. And there it was, the glare of those piercing bright eyes, the slight gathering of the brows as Sherlock Holmes began reading someone who was, to him, a newly opened book.

He took a step toward her, slowly. He couldn't have been looking at her any more intently, even if he had recognized her.

Harry had to clear her throat before her voice would work.

"Hello," she said. "I'm--"

"Harry Watson," Sherlock murmured.

The tone of voice was not encouraging. Bracing herself, Harry extended her hand.

"You must be Sherlock Holmes."

Sherlock didn't move to take her hand; didn't even look down at it.

"You're late," was all he said.

"Yes," Harry answered, a little creakily. "I am very late."

There was a rustle of skirts from the corridor behind the opposite arch. She heard two voices, both indistinct. John's, saying something just too softly for Harry to hear; and then a woman's laughter.

Harry did her best to freeze, just like John always did when something awful happened to him. But she couldn't stop herself from sweating; and she withdrew her hand just an instant too late to stop Sherlock from noticing that it was shaking.

Harry closed her eyes and counted to five. Then she turned around.

Well, at least John recognized her. And at least his shock kept her attention riveted on his face, so she could almost forget about the woman standing next to him.

"Harry," he finally said, with a half-smile that he surely wasn't feeling. "You came."

"I'm sorry I'm late," she said, folding her hands. "And...for not RSVPing. And...for..."

John clenched his jaw, and looked away. Harry looked down, and sighed.

Mary's voice blossomed in the silence. "Thank you so much for coming, Harry."

She couldn't very well avoid looking at her now. And there she was. Older, of course. But the same blond hair, the same open, friendly, frank face, the same little twist at the corners of her mouth, as if to show she was always ready to laugh, if anything really funny or really wicked came along.

Harry's heart was pounding so hard she could hardly hear Mary saying, "I'm so glad to meet you at last. John's told me so much about you."

With superhuman effort, Harry swallowed the nausea that had been slowly rising ever since she entered the room, took Mary's offered hand, did not burst into tears as she touched the warm skin of a woman she had always believed she would never see again, and said, as lightheartedly as she could, "Has he really? I only wish I knew what it was."

"All good things, of course," said Mary, with a wink. 

Harry shook her hand once, and said, "Lord love you for a liar."

While Mary laughed, Harry risked another glance at John.

His face was a mask. In the eyes, maybe, she could see perhaps the ghost of the boy she'd grown up with. But she couldn't be sure she wasn't just wishing it there. She had no idea what was going on under the facade now. None. He was putting up the front for her that he would have put up with any stranger.

"Thanks for coming," he said, putting his hand out stiffly.

Harry shook it, just as stiffly. "I couldn't...you know. Your big day. I wanted to be there."

He released her hand as soon as he could do it. The three of them stood there, silent, pained, awkward.

She shouldn't have come. He didn' t need her there, he didn't even want her there. He'd invited her because he thought he had to and because he didn't think she would come. And now everyone was sorry she had.

"Well, come on in," said John, with an attempt at heartiness. "I think the bar's still open. Can I get you--"

"NO."

It came out too loud and too angry. Everyone was staring.

"I'm sorry. I mean no, no thank you. I can't stay. I just wanted...to see you," she said, struggling to keep her voice under control. "And to wish you both all the happiness...all the happiness you should have...all the happiness you deserve. All the happiness in the world."

John looked at her, as if he were perhaps thinking about saying something. Then the bridesmaid, who had wandered off, stuck her head back in through the archway.

"They're ready now," she said.

John looked at Sherlock. Sherlock disappeared into the ballroom. Harry turned to watch. He was walking toward a raised platform at the end of the hall, where someone had set up a music stand.

Mary laid a hand on Harry's shoulder. She tried not to jump out of her skin.

"Don't go," Mary said, gently. "Stay. I know John wants to talk to you. Do stay. Please."

Harry looked into her eyes. She remembered Mary's eyes so well. Large, and soft, and full of understanding. She must have looked at me just that way, Harry thought, when I told her I loved her. With just that combination of compassion and warmth and affection and pity.

"As you wish," Harry said.

John took Mary's arm. They swept into the ballroom. Harry joined the others, forming a hollow square around the empty space in the center of the floor. She glanced up at Sherlock, standing on the platform, violin raised, ready to play the first note.

* * *

Harry sat on the steps outside, wiping her face with the back of one hand. She stared disconsolately at the wet smudge on her cuff. Good thing she didn't wear eyeliner.

She heard a pair of men's shoes stop behind her. When she looked up, Sherlock Holmes was sitting on the step next to her. He had packed up the violin, and his coat lay folded up on the step behind them.

"Where did it go wrong?" he said.

Harry looked at him.

"Define 'it'," she replied. 

"The waltz. I'm thinking particularly of the modulation after the first repeated section, I was never sure about that but I couldn't--"

Harry was already shaking her head. "No. No. It was beautiful, your waltz. All of it."

"You left after the modulation."

"I heard the rest from out here."

One of Sherlock's hands knotted into a fist as he let out a hiss of irritation.

"The most frustrating thing about ordinary people is they won't tell you when you're being incompetent or insensitive or an arsehole or when you've just said something so vastly inappropriate and so utterly outside the realm of what is fancifully called the 'normal' that everyone who witnessed it is silently deciding that you are an abomination who should have been strangled in the cradle. Now John is not an ordinary person, not in that way, and clearly neither are you. So tell me where it went wrong."

Harry sighed. She tried making eye contact. It was all right. It seemed almost as if he knew her well enough to look back.

"Listen to me, Sherlock," Harry said, slowly. "It was beautiful. I did not walk out because I didn't like it. I walked out because it reminded me...because it was making me cry."

"I've been making people cry all night," Sherlock muttered. "I don't do it on purpose. It seems people cry at weddings. It seems they  _enjoy_ it," he said, with a little frown of disgust. 

"They do," Harry echoed.

"You could have stayed," Sherlock said. "Nobody would have noticed you crying. The place was positively soggy."

He was the only one of them who still sounded like his old self. Talking to him really felt almost normal.

"You don't have much experience with crying, Sherlock," Harry said. "There are many different varieties. Not perhaps as many as there are varieties of tobacco ash. But there's a time and a place for--"

"The wedding cry," Sherlock broke in, "begins with a sniffle and the resultant crinkling of the nose. Then a few tears leak from the inside corner of the eye, which are easily absorbed with two or three dabs from a handkerchief or napkin or other absorbent fabric."

Harry nodded. "That kind of crying," she said, "you can do at a wedding. Brokenhearted messy sobbing over what you've lost and can never recover because you were never supposed to have it in the first place,  _that_ you have to do outside."

Sherlock directed his glittering stare away from her, into the darkness.

"Are you happy for them?" he said, as if the question were a puzzle he was failing to solve.

"Yes," Harry said. "It's what I always wanted for him. And for her."

The obviously unhappy sound of her voice brought Sherlock's glance back to her.

"Harry Watson," Sherlock said. "Sober at the moment, but only recently, or should I say temporarily. Didn't know you were coming until the last minute, no RSVP, the suit is appropriate enough but clearly something you bought for work, there's a scuff on the heel of one shoe that you'd have masked with polish if you'd had more time. You do take pride in your appearance, or should I say in putting your best face forward, which partly explains your total absence from John's life as you sort out a messy break-up and continue a so far futile quest for sobriety. In love with John's wife, who is pretending she hasn't met you, which is one of many--"

"She hasn't met me, Sherlock," Harry said, dropping her head to her knees and putting her hands over her head. "She hasn't. Love at first sight. It is a thing. It has happened to me before."

"So you don't deny it."

"That isn't even it," Harry cried. "That isn't even--you know, losing a woman you love to someone else, it hurts but it's not fatal. I've survived it. But family, Sherlock," she said, finally looking up at him because she needed someone to at least  _see_ her, even if he couldn't understand. "John is all the family I have left. And...there's nothing. We're nothing to each other now."

Sherlock sat there while she cried some more. He was intrigued, obviously. She was a mystery to him now--one he would never solve. 

"I should never have come," Harry said. "Go back in and dance. Have a good time. I'm not your business. You don't even know me."

"You say that simply because we've never met," Sherlock said. "But in fact I do know, thanks to a cursory inspection of the contents of the rubbish tin in the kitchenette of 221B Baker Street performed in the early afternoon of May 23, 2011, that John is in fact glad you came."

Harry rubbed her eyes with the back of one wrist. He seemed to find this all the encouragement necessary.

"John craves adventure precisely because in his day to day life he is above all a creature of routine. When he knows he will be out in the field all day he packs himself a sandwich, usually egg and tomato, sometimes sliced ham with ploughman's mustard, he has an odd preference for spongy soft mass-produced bread containing chemicals whose names he couldn't even pronounce. When he is doing this under my baleful eye, he simply wraps the sandwich in foil and puts it in his satchel; but I was out on a case the morning of May 23, 2011. When I returned, I saw that in the rubbish bin were eight short strips of bread bearing traces of mustard, all severed with the same dull but serrated blade, and in the vicinity of correspondingly short and thin fragments of ham. Obviously, the crusts trimmed from the sandwich John made for himself that morning, but John doesn't trim the crusts from his sandwiches, not when  _I'm_ watching. My presence inhibits him. Why? An aversion to the crust that forms during baking, or the closest thing to baking that ever happens to John's preferred brand of sandwich bread, is characteristic of childhood, it's a preference most palates grow out of, so John has duly accustomed himself to eating bread with the crusts on because that's what big boys do and it's very important to him that I know he's a big boy. But at certain times, on May 23 for instance which is the anniversary of your mother's death, he cannot deny himself this tiny comfort. Another bungler might have deduced that it was John's mother who prepared the crustless sandwiches of his childhood. But unlike my brother Mycroft I don't need to violate John's confidentiality agreement with his therapists to know that his father was an autocratic and cold bastard for whom John could never be man enough and that his mother was an ineffective doormat who was terrified of crossing her husband in even the smallest thing. Daddy Watson wouldn't have let Mummy Watson baby his son and heir in that way or any other; but someone must have. Someone was willing to brave paternal displeasure and the great unpleasantness that always came with it by making little Johnny's sandwiches just the way he liked them and by process of elimination that person can only have been you."

Harry lifted her head. She had heard him do that thing he did--in her other life--so many times. But she had never heard it done with precisely this plaintive note of...regret. Sorrow even. 

When she looked at Sherlock, he looked away. She said, "You think about John all the time, don't you?"

Sherlock snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. My mind is occupied during my entire waking existence and much of my REM sleep with a plethora of ongoing deductions, calculations, investigations, and theoretical extrapolations required by the nature of my profession."

"Yes," Harry nodded. "And while you are doing all that, you think about John. All the time."

He stopped talking for a long moment.

"I multitask," he finally said.

They sat together in silence, listening to the music drifting through the ballroom windows.

"Good night, Sherlock," Harry finally said, standing up. "Thanks for sitting with me. It was kind."

"I'm not  _kind_ ," Sherlock scoffed.

"No, of course not. Well. You can stop not being kind to me, I'm all right now."

He looked up at her. "You're going."

"I am."

"You've just come."

"I know."

"If indeed you intend to leave without any further conversation with John, I'm afraid I fail to see the object of your visit."

Still so protective, Harry thought. It made her smile, as bad as she felt.

"What's to be gained by staying, Sherlock?" she said. "A few more minutes of standing around making awkward chat about what we're doing now and what our plans are. Promising to get together again soon and knowing we'll never do it. Straining for something that at least sounds like a casual friendship because we're scared of how close we once were and hurt by how distant we are now. Wanting to be more to each other than we are. Who needs it?"

Sherlock got to his feet, slowly.

"Nobody, I suppose," he said.

"The object of my visit," Harry repeated. "I suppose the object was...sometime, reasonably soon, he and Mary will be sitting together at home talking about the wedding, and how happy they were. And John will say, "And Harry even showed up." And that'll be all. But Mary will smile at him, because she knows that...it's not that it made him happy, exactly, but it dispelled a shadow. It lifted off a little cloud of disappointment. I came because...I wanted  _not_ to spoil his day, even just a little, by  _not_ being there."

Harry turned to look back at the brightly lit windows of the ballroom.

"Leader or follower?" Sherlock said, abruptly.

"I'm sorry?" Harry said, turning to him.

"The subtle and no doubt subconscious changes in posture with which your body is responding to the music indicate that you have had a not inconsiderable amount of ballroom dance training. You would of course prefer to partner other women, which raises the question of who should lead. So. Are you a leader or a follower?"

Harry tried to figure out what the correct answer was for this timeline.

"I'm a follower," Harry said, looking back at him. 

The music had shifted into something slower. By straining her ears, she could just about make out the melody, though the words remained a blur.

"Oh my God," she said, raising her hands with a laugh. "Cyndi Lauper. 'Time After Time.' Have you ever seen  _Strictly Ballroom?_ " _  
_

He blinked once. Otherwise his face never changed.

He said, "Two hundred and thirty-seven times."

Harry smiled at him. "May I have this--" she began.  

As soon as she spoke, Sherlock's arms leapt immediately into a beautiful, if slightly rigid, frame.

Harry insinuated herself rather awkwardly into it. He stepped forward, and they were off and away.

****

"Stop it, Mary," John muttered, as Mary dragged him by the hand through the ballroom. "Harry's probably at the bar. We should let her stay there. We'll be very lucky if--"

"She came all this way, John, you're not going to let her go home without speaking to her."

"I have spoken to her."

Mary dismissed that with a grunt.

They had reached the back of the ballroom, where the bar had been set up. There was no sign of Harry.

"Throwing up in the ladies' loo, maybe," John said.

"You know, John," Mary replied, quite calmly, as she grabbed his wrist in her iron grip, "you can be very nasty when you want to."

"So can she," John answered. He'd told Mary a fair amount about Harry--he told Mary everything, she wanted to hear it, it was such a relief that she wanted that--but he'd never seemed able to convey to her just how much of his adult life Harry had disrupted or spoiled or otherwise rendered painful. Unimpressed by his protests, she dragged him to the entrance hall.

Through the open archway they could see two figures waltzing. One of them, obviously, was Sherlock. The other was harder to place.

"Oh look," Mary said. "He's found someone."

"I don't think so, Mary," John answered, as the couple circled into the beam of one of the floodlights. "That's Harry he's dancing with."

"Well," Mary mused, as surprised as John was, "Harry's _someone_."

Mary slipped a hand through John's arm. They watched together as the song ended. The DJ segued immediately into "Everlasting Love."

Sherlock and Harry dropped each other at the same instant, stepping back from each other in some alarm. Then Sherlock made her a curiously stiff little formal bow. Harry, after a moment's indecision, bowed back. It looked rather like the end of a very awkward, rather unfortunate karate lesson. Harry stuck her hands into her pockets and walked away. Sherlock walked back to the steps, picked up his coat, and swung it behind him in a graceful arc. He slid into it, wrapped it round him, and walked off in the other direction.

John felt his throat tighten.

"You'll see him again, John," Mary said. "He knows that. He'll be all right." Mary squinted into the darkness that had now all but enveloped Harry. "Maybe you'll even see her again. Who knows? Miracles do happen, as we know."

John turned back toward Mary. Her eyes were so bright, and so kind, and so full of love. He was a lucky man. Luckier than he had ever thought he could be. Right now, at this instant, his life was perfect. Maybe that was how, from now on, it would be. Everyone always said it, after all. Marriage changes everything.

THE END


End file.
